To expand on this - I’m interested in thinking about times that a cause we support won, not only because maybe it feels good to see positive stories instead of all negative, but also because specific examples might help illustrate why it won, and reveal strategies we can use in the future.
Our HOA amended the rules to keep predatory landlords out of the neighborhood. Like most people, I don’t like HOAs. But, I really hate predatory landlords. The HOA was having difficulty getting the necessary votes. So I got off my lazy ass and went door to door for weeks until we got all the votes we needed. I had some help, but I got about 80% of what we needed on my own. It was a lot of work, but it was worth it. Now when houses sell in the neighborhood, families buy them instead of corporations.
That’s great! Seems like a good example of a minor change for that moment but with a potentially huge impact over time. How did the amended rule first come up as a possible change? About how many votes were needed to get it passed?
The HOA board was concerned about all the rentals that were quickly popping up over the past few years. They hired a lawyer to write the proposed ammendment and the language of the ballot. This all happened prior to my involvement. I personally drummed up about 70 votes. It’s hard to get people to answer their doors these days. People assume you’re trying to sell them something.
At first glance, this just sounds like a “keep renters out because they’re bad for the existing owners’ property values” (as well as being on average younger, less wealthy, etc.) policy.
The same kind of reasoning is often used as a pretense to block construction and perpetuate the existing shortage. Pure self-interest masquerading as a good cause.
Well you have it completely wrong. The language was carefully crafted by the lawyer to exclude predatory corporate renters, not all renting. We have quite a few renters in the neighborhood, and if someone meets certain criteria (living in the neighborhood long enough, and other special circumstances) they are allowed to rent.
But I’m sure you’ll find some way to twist this too, so you can keep your moral superiority hard-on going.
That’s not what the word predatory means.
Usually that has to do with things like pricing (both initially and any future increases), handling of maintenance, problems, and of things like late payments, etc.
You’re looking at it once again purely through the lens of how it affects the existing owners. For example an existing long term owner in the area would not be considered predatory based on your criteria no matter how much price gouging they engage in.
I don’t generally care for HOAs, and you’re right that rules shouldn’t be made just to protect existing owners’ property value.
A relatively new issue has been people buying houses to rent as airbnb/vrbo, which takes properties out of the available inventory for long term living, and raises the overall cost floor. Another one is big buyers like Zillow vacuuming up inventory and then algorithmically extracting more money when they sell, which also hurts the average person. Not sure if these issues were the primary driver in this case, but as described sounds like this HOA change would help.
Probably a real stupid one.
The CEO plays golf with a bunch of dept leads. I’m one of the few dept leads who works remotely, and I don’t play golf. So I’m frequently not on his radar (which includes things like budget and promotions too).
He had a “brilliant” idea to make a internal project that should have gone to my department. We are literally the subject matter experts. But he gave it to another department. The dept lead tried to play both sides. He wanted the project because it’ll earn him brownie points with the CEO. But he tried to appease my dept by saying it’s a experiment.
I didn’t care. I was a bit annoyed the CEO ignored us. But my dept was in no position to take more work.
Well, by taking the project on, their department was under a lot of scrutiny. The internal tool touched everybody. They don’t have UX experience. They don’t know how to work collaboratively. They over engineered the hell of out it. You can’t make changes without being a senior developer (which means even juniors can’t contribute wtf) And worse, the CEO got pissed off that this expensive internal tool barely works. That dept lead went from “Oh we got this” to now fuming over the status of the project.
Finally, a C-level person demanded the other dept hand it over to my dept.
We took the project and rebuilt it in our technology. It took them three months, and we had it fully working in a week. Even better, my dept builds tools for non-technicals. So it was coded in a way where new features can be added by anybody, and managed by a non-engineer. My team still didn’t get credit/attention from the CEO. But whatever.
Successfully sued a previous employer for unpaid wages after I noticed they were shorting me and everyone I worked with by over $100 every check.
Did you guys get paid and was it a fair amount considering how much they shorted everyone?
We won a 6 dollar per hour kicker towards our healthcare, which if you declined the company healthcare that money ended up in your pocket so you can buy healthcare elsewhere.
Left that job for other reasons but we raised everyone salaries by about 30% in that time too. Huge wins for the workforce.
That’s awesome. What do you think was the deciding factor in getting those concessions?
First and foremost: unionization.
Second: picking the right people for your negotiation committee. We spent nearly 8 months preparing to sit down with the company, and the first meeting was a complete wash. Second meeting we talked them into it with a rational appeal regarding the reality of insurance costs plus the fact that a sick workforce cannot work.
As far as wages: make them fight you for everything they want. Itemize every part of your job. Make lanes and stay in them. When your union goes to negotiate, the union has the upper hand. You inform them what you will do, not what you desire.
My only-moderately-winning example - we got our state senator to co-sponsor a bill.
I volunteered with a group fighting gerrymandering in our state. Our local working group’s senator, a democrat, would not co-sponsor. We were trying to get so many legislators on board that leadership was compelled to move the bill out of committee. First we tried meeting with the senator. We got one of their staff instead, who promised the senator would look into it. A few weeks passed and nothing happened. Then on facebook their account made a post talking about their support of democratic reforms and specifically mentioned gerrymandering. So our local volunteers piled on asking why they hadn’t co-sponsored (which didn’t go anywhere) but that did give us the impression we were being put off. So we started a campaign where we went door to door in the senator’s district and got constituents to sign a letter asking the senator to co-sponsor. This was over a few weeks, and we knew word would have reached them because at least one of the people we met door to door had a personal connection to the senator. We had about 50 letters and hadn’t even delivered them yet when the senator co-sponsored the bill.
